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Southern Ekorra, WIP

I've been working on this map for a few days now.

Step 1:
Coast traced in Inkscape. Lines around the coast done in Inkscape this time too. The outset path function is kind of buggy. On some steps it would connect points that were nowhere near each other, giving you black lines across the picture.

Step 2:
Mountains added in GIMP. These are a couple of brushes I made by tracing mountains off a picture of an antique map. I added more images to the larger brush this time so I wouldn't have as many repeats. But now it looks like I used a slightly larger brush on the first ones. Oops. Also, the large mountains looked a little oversized on this map so I was using the brush at 75% but the smaller brush at full size---so there's line weight variations all over this. I'm hoping it's not noticeable once everything's colored.

Step 3:
Rivers added in Inkscape, using the "shape: triangle out" and "shape: from clipboard" options on the pencil tool. I hadn't tried this before. Results are MUCH nicer than my hand-drawn attempts.

On the longer rivers especially I got the best results using not a triangle as the model shape but a sort of pentagon only tapering only along 40% of its length.

I imported the rivers into GIMP to clean them up where tributaries met and where they meet the coast. Hm. Now I've been playing around with it some more, and it looks like if I'd just set a fill color on everything, I could have used "Union" to join branches and "Difference" to join rivers to the coast.

Step 4:
At this point, I decided I didn't want to commit to placing cities and countries just yet. So this is just a physical map. I slapped some labels on in Inkscape. I'm planning to go back and fiddle with this. Something's not working for me; I'm not sure if it's the font or what.

So that's where I am now on the lineart. Today I moved on to coloring. Picture #2 is me messing around. For a while there I was leaning toward ditching the inked mountains and redoing them all in a painted style (you can also see me trying to figure out how to draw forests). But I also like the look you can see on the southern continent with the strong inked lines just colored in. Also, it's much faster. So that's what I'm going with.

I love the comic book style of that south part there. My teenage goal was to someday be a comic book artist so I'm sort of biased towards that. The painting style is very much en vogue and commands big bucks...it's pretty and painterly. I like both of those 2 styles. The only thing on the black and white map irking me is the line weight (thickness) of the rings...they should get thinner as they go out or fade out to gray. Otherwise, good stuff, man.

If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)

An update

Ascension, I changed the line weight on the rings around the coast, though on this little map it's kind of hard to tell. Now they're all broken up and faded, too.

I will try out the more painted style on some future project. But I also like this style.

Today I added a few more rivers and finished coloring in the rivers and mountains. Looking at it now, I see I need to redo the new rivers; they're smoother than the old ones. Next I'll work on the lettering some more.

Oh, and I should probably mention I'm female before everyone gets used to calling me "man."